A review of a second edition might be regarded as superfluous. After all, republication indicates market approval, these days a legitimate evaluation of scholarship in its own right. Moreover, Greener's first edition was well received by reviewers both for its content and style. Yet, in many aspects this has become a distinctive and valuable contribution to the textbook literature. Thus a review is timely to see how the second edition has developed its qualities.

Some distinctive features of the original are sustained in ways this reviewer finds reassuring. The structure eschews a blow-by-blow representation of the architecture and behaviours of public management in favour of thematic discussions of the context, ideas, funding, professionalism, users, markets and performance of public management. The style is direct, easy to read, helpfully illustrated by tables and vignettes, and informatively supported rather than overwhelmed by references. And perhaps most notably, it retains a ‘critical, comparative and international approach’ to public management.

However, Greener has very deliberately produced more than an updated edition. Two developments are notable. First, and perhaps most obviously necessary, is his immediate attempt to place public management in the context of the worldwide financial crisis. This was only just emerging at the time of the first edition so addressing its constraining and enabling forces was a requirement here which is more than adequately fulfilled. Second, and intellectually more challenging, is his development from the first edition of the idea of public administration as inherently paradoxical, defined by its intrinsic and inescapable contradictions.

The idea of public management as paradox is not original, of course, but Greener has made an attempt to develop it systematically in a way that satisfies the interests of both scholarly and practice communities. That is commendable in itself. However, there are frustrations in the application. For a work that is explicitly critical and analytical, there are some features that it shares with others in public and social policy – an inattention to the rigour of our conceptual tools and the consequences for practice.

Greener observes that Stone, on whose work on paradox he draws, does not define her term in detail (Reference Stone2012). But while he then addresses some very well chosen areas of paradox in public management, he too avoids tackling the conceptual irregularities that are a very part of the paradox. For example, he describes the changing relationships of service users with providers. He writes with insight of the changing customisation of service provision (reflecting his work elsewhere). But for practice, the paradox here is that provision has to deal with the inherent and inescapable contradictions in providing for users who for the same service can relate to it as citizens (undifferentiated obligations), clients (differentiated access and provision adjudicated by professionals) and customers (reciprocal choice for users and providers). See higher education for starters! Yet Greener's tendency is to equate consumers (those who consume) with customers (those who have a choice reciprocal to that of providers) and thus understates the paradox for practice.

He also deals with more systemic features of the provision of public services through market arrangements that bring an increasing range of statutory and non-statutory provisions with varying patterns of authority and function, rights and obligations, including for accountability, and policy formulation and enactment. These manifestations of governance also exemplify paradox. Practice now has to deal with inescapable contradictions in the modes of governance that include command (in which legitimacy for action is prescribed through due process – rule of law), communion (in which legitimacy is prescribed by consistency with shared values and frames of reference) and contract (in which legitimacy is based on the terms of an inducement–contribution exchange). Greener does not use the governance word, perhaps in recognition of a pretty poor literature to call on, but he misses a great opportunity in his last chapter (‘Putting it all together’) to both sharpen the conceptual armoury and make manifest the paradoxical.

Inescapable contradictions such as these are now common features of the provision of personal human services throughout western countries. Yet they are not fully exposed in Greener's otherwise illuminating treatment. Perhaps they will be addressed in the third edition. For the moment, we have the benefit (most particularly for advanced students as well as their teachers) of an even more thoughtful, critical and research-based text than we had in the first edition.